So Republicans have declared that the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was "legitimate political discourse." Only several Republicans have objected to that characterization.
Really? Grabbing handfuls of human feces and smearing it on the walls of the Capitol hallways is legitimate political discourse? Really? Attacking Capitol Police officers and threatening their lives is legitimate political discourse? Four have since died.
Just like "normal tourists," Republicans say. Really? What I saw with my eyes on Jan. 6 did not resemble any tourist destination I have ever visited.
Republican efforts to normalize Jan. 6 is an Orwellian attempt to curry favor with that festering pustule of narcissistic lies once known as president and in the future known as inmate Donald Trump.
More light is being shed daily on Trump's seditious attempts to stage a coup, which would have illegally kept him in power. His vice president, Mike Pence, repudiated Trump's assertion that he, Pence, had the power to overturn the election. Pence's reward for four years of grovelling loyalty to a lunatic was for Trump's minions to seek him out with a noose for lynching on Jan. 6.
Well, that is what tourists do, isn't it?
With few exceptions Republicans are genuflecting to Trump in the hope he will not sic his base followers on them. They will eviscerate our democratic institutions if Trump asks them to do so in order to keep power.
So now we have Joe Kent, Republican candidate for our 3rd Congressional District seat, fully embracing Donald Trump and his lies. Trump and Kent's “America First” isolationism would have left the door wide open for Trump's thug buddies like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping to do whatever they want to. Russian troops would have long ago overrun Ukraine if Trump had won or stolen a second term. By now they would be turning on the Eastern European members of NATO. We learned this lesson in the 1930s and 1940s. What happens in Europe and elsewhere in the world has consequences for us.
On his website, Kent says, "In November 2020 the American people's trust was broken by widespread irregularities, fraud and the media's commanding narrative that Joe Biden had won the presidency." That is a dangerous and demonstrable lie.
Kent claims that the 2020 presidential election has not been properly "adjudicated" and therefore Congress must fix what 63 different courts and judges got wrong. Many of the judges were Trump appointees. Trump lost in court 63-0. When a Pennsylvania judge asked Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani “where is your evidence of voter fraud?" Giuliani, realizing he was in a court of law and not being interviewed by FOX News, replied truthfully, "we don't have any evidence of voter fraud."
"The trust we have in our system of government is sacred, " Kent says.
That is true, and it is Kent and Trump and people like them who have engaged in unceasing assaults, to the point of physical violence, on the integrity of election systems, election officials and election workers throughout the country, sowing the very distrust they now propose to remedy. The Republican Party and Joe Kent have turned their back on American democracy and Kent does not deserve a seat in Congress.
Marty Ansley
Cinebar
